Kami is an Intuitive, Beautiful New Puzzle Game for iPad and iPhone

A touchscreen is perfectly designed for a visual puzzle experience, and the new game Kami for iOS seems to get that quite well. This is a color matching game where you must fill the game board with a single shade. That's by no means a new idea, but Kami has style and great design to set it apart.

A touchscreen is perfectly designed for a visual puzzle experience, and the new game Kami for iOS seems to get that quite well. This is a color matching game where you must fill the game board with a single shade. That's by no means a new idea, but Kami has style and great design to set it apart.

Each puzzle consists of small colored squares of three or more colors. The texture is that of paper, a look that is only reinforced in every single interaction with the game. Along the right side of the screen are larger colored blocks where you choose your preferred color. Tap anywhere on the game board (in a different color) and that color will spread out in a wave of folding, crinkling paper. The color will expand until it has consumed every square sharing an edge with the previous color. in this way you expand and consumer more colors until you've made the board all a single shade.

The catch is that there is a recommended number of moves each puzzle can be completed in. You can simply tap around until the board is cleared in some obscene number of moves, but that lacks elegance, doesn't it? It's far more rewarding to puzzles over the arrangement of the squares and combination of colors you have to work with in order to device the perfect strategy.

The first few puzzles are very simple and mainly geared toward teaching you the game mechanics. After that they start to get more complicated, eventually adding in more colors. The developers seem to have found a good learning curve, though. Kami is challenging, but not so difficult that you need to set it down—it's just a relaxing experience.

Every little folding animation and paper scraping sound is perfectly tuned to an almost skeuomorphic degree, but that's fine in the context of a game about folding paper. The game has just launched with 36 puzzles and more on the way in free updates. Kami is only $0.99 and it's a universal app for iPhone and iPad.

Ryan Whitwam is a freelance tech/science writer and fan of all things electronic. This long-time skeptic and former research scientist is a lover of the em dash and a defender of the Oxford comma. He also writes for Geek.com and ExtremeTech.
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